When Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes was released three years ago, it melded the worlds of psychology and literature, tapping into a deeply human need for self-knowledge. The book—now translated into 16 languages—quickly became a bestseller, as readers wanted learn how to apply the teachings of a brilliant (if fictional) detective to their own lives.

Today, Konnikova, who is both a psychologist and a writer for The New Yorker, as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times, continues her interest in dissecting human behavior with the release of The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time.

The book shows how the confidence game is the oldest game in the book, and how the digital era is only providing new opportunities for its artists to succeed. It’s an important lesson. Since 2008, online scams have more than doubled. Back in 2007, they were one fifth of all fraud cases. In 2011, they were 40%. In 2012, there were almost 300,000 complaints of online fraud with over $525 million lost. And these numbers don’t tell the whole story, because a good con is never discovered. And, those who do get conned are often too embarrassed to fess up.

In The Confidence Game, Konnikova offers suggestions—not solutions—for how to avoid being duped.

TechRepublic spoke with Konnikova about the misconceptions around confidence artists, how the con has changed with the landscape of the internet, and why anyone can fall victim to a scheme.

Why does the confidence game have such a long history?

We have a con in the Bible—there’s the story of Rachel and Leah, where you’re expecting to marry one daughter but get tricked into a marriage you didn’t want. There’s a reason that the Bible is told through stories rather than through logic because that’s the way you engage people and get them to believe things. When you’re in storytelling narrative, you drop your guard and stop questioning.

The con is really the oldest story that there is—it’s a story about belief and about meaning. That’s what con artists do.

How does the con game operate in our digital world?

Technology and technological advances are really the beautiful playground of the confidence game and of con artists. Any advance that we think makes us more sophisticated, more savvy, better protected, is also something that con artists are using and figuring out how to take advantage of. As we put more and more of our lives online, we become better and better targets and become easier and easier to target because we leave so much of our identity out in the open. That’s something that makes cons much more ubiquitous and much easier to pull off than they have been in the past. Google is wonderful for us when we’re researching, but it’s also the con artist’s best friend. They can look up anything very, very quickly.

Why don’t many people admit when they’ve been conned?

People really don’t want to report it because that means admitting that they were victims. We still have, as a society, this image of people who fall for scams. Especially online scams, for some reason. Just like we still kind of look down upon online dating. People will still snicker at you if you say you met your significant other online, which is kind of crazy but it still happens. I think people really, really look down at victims of online fraud. Nobody wants to be seen as a sap.

Who are the most-common victims? The elderly, less-computer savvy type?

Depending on the type of fraud, the victim profiles can change completely. Sometimes it’s people who are younger, sometimes it’s people who are really wealthy. Sometimes it’s men, sometimes it’s women. Basically, the takeaway is, there is no takeaway. Everyone is a potential victim. In fact, when it comes to online fraud, the elderly are actually a pretty small percentage, because if you think about how many elderly people actually use the internet, it’s not a very big number. Among the ones that do, they’re often the more technologically sophisticated people.

How do con artists go after young people online?

Social media is one of the absolute easiest ways to target young people. It can be Twitter, it can be SnapChat, it can be Instagram. Instagram is actually huge for con artists because we put so much information on there. A lot of times people don’t remove geotags. I mean, here’s this photographic treasure trove that shows you, where you are, what you like, and your precise time and location. Which is manna to a con artist.

How are cons affected during times of transition?

Every single time that we get a huge shift in technology, every time we are in areas of transition, we see cons flourishing and changing. It happened with western expansion. That’s when the con really established itself in America where you had the Wild West and the gold rush and all of these things where anything was possible and all of this stuff was happening. No one really knew what to expect.

All of a sudden you have all of these opportunities, and that’s where things like The Big Store, the first really good con established themselves in New York, which was basically a gambling storefront where people made bets—it was all fraudulent, and they couldn’t actually win, but they did this anyway because, “Hey, why not?”

That’s exactly what’s happening with the internet. People don’t really know what to expect. Every new technology, by the way, comes with another weird con artist who wants to install that technology and fix it for you. They have con artists fooling people with television installations, with radio installations, with telephone installations. Everything that we don’t really understand well, everything that’s new, is an opportunity for a con artist to strike.

And we’re in a pretty uncertain time right now, with advances in AI/robotics and potential changes in the workforce.

These times of transition create a lot of upheaval and uncertainty. We don’t really know what the world is going to look like in a few years. What happens if what I do is obsolete? What happens if my job is obsolete? I just bought this awesome new television, but what if it ends up being some awful waste? We don’t really know what’s going to happen and we feed that feeling of uncertainty and of not knowing.

When that happens, we crave something that’s really stable and certain. That’s what con artists are really able to offer us at the end of the day. They can really create an illusion that everything’s okay.

The other thing that happens is we don’t want people to think that we’re just old farts who can’t run with the times. Nobody wants to be accused of being behind the curb, so we become more liable, more open to new information and to new stories than we would be otherwise because we don’t want to come off as people who are old and close-minded.

Can anybody be conned?

No matter who you are, it’s a basic human need to have meaning and to believe in something. You cannot live life otherwise. It’s deeply ingrained in us. We could be the most prominent scientist in the world, the biggest skeptic in the world, even somebody who studies con artists for a living. We could be a con artist ourselves. Yet, that need is so strong and so deep that there’s really no way to circumvent it. It occurs with absolutely everyone.

There’s even a subset of cons designed to con con artists. That, to me, is kind of the perfect proof of concept.

Why are we so bad at detecting lies?

It’s more evolutionarily adaptive to be trusting. You end up being happier, healthier, making more money. It often goes along with intelligence. It’s a very good thing actually most of the time to trust people. We haven’t evolved to spot deception because it’s better for us not to, it actually makes society function much more smoothly.

Think about how much we deceive each other on a daily basis. Not conning people with malicious intentions, but saying things like, “Oh, it’s so nice to see you. How are you?” When really it’s really not nice to see you. If we were able to tell all those small lies as long as they happened, that would really be devastating. We’d be like, “Oh, I look terrible. This person doesn’t care about me. No one cares about me. The world’s a shitty place.” That is a really awful way to live, and so we haven’t developed those mechanisms.

The other part of it is that when we trust each other, we can get stuff done. We can cooperate, we can create new institutions, it’s something that we can’t do at all if we don’t trust each other. It’s better for society to trust. I think the bottom line is that we just haven’t evolved to this ability. It’s not good for us to spot deception most of the time and it’s not worth it to spot it the few times that it is good for us.

What are the biggest cons in the business world? What lessons we could draw?

The two biggest are Ponzi schemes and insider trading. Whenever something seems too good to be true, it is. The red flag for both of those types of schemes is often better returns for longer. It’s not just one good year or a few good years, it’s consistently wonderful. But the markets are unpredictable, they’re the markets, and no one is that good. We still believe they’re true when they’re happening to us because we want those wonderful returns. We look the other way. We don’t question when things are going well, we only question when things aren’t going well.

How can we guard ourselves against becoming duped?

We can really learn to understand ourselves a bit better. Con artists really draw close psychological profiles of their victims. They try to understand what makes them work, what they want, the things that excite them, what they really desire in life. What story am I going to pitch this person? What makes them tick? We don’t really do that about ourselves, but if we did we’d know what our weak points are. Our weak points are our desires. They’re the things that we want to believe.

Whenever things are going really, really well, we should have a really red flag and ask, “Okay. Why is everything going so well? What’s going on here?”

Also see

So you read “tower defense” and went “meh”. Ok, we get that. But there is a portion of you out there who think TD games are the best mind exercise apps and time wasters among the genres of games in the Google Play Store. And so for those specific people – who might have already tired Nival’s excellent Prime World Defenders TD game – this sequel is for you.

You heard it right, Nival is back with Prime World Defenders 2. And if you enjoyed how polished the initial game was, then you can expect the same excellence from the sequel. The initial game was really fresh because it added the collectible card twist to the game – players got different cards from beating maps and bosses, and they were able to use the cards within the game.

Prime World Defenders 2 just builds on the game before it, albeit with better graphics and a new, more immersive portrait mode. There are towers, and now runes, to collect to make your defense more powerful. There are a lot of monsters to beat and 29 unique boss characters you have to play through.

The game is free to download with IAPs, pick it up at the download link below. If you were once interested in the TD genre, we promise you that Prime World Defenders 2 is a good reason to look into it again. Enjoy gaming!

Android has always been complicated when it came to processes between your PC – normally running on Windows – and your smartphone which ran on Android. Unlike in iOS, one thing Android users can actually envy Apple users on is the seamless process of sending messages from OSX on your Macbook and sent through your iPhone. Of course, it may just be the way Android is made – which means you need an app for that. Among the many that allow you to do this on Android, we can now add Microsoft’s Cortana to the list.

Cortana, Microsoft’s digital voice assistant, has recently been approved for Android as an alternative for Google Now. And while it may still be clunky on the features end, you can’t say that you won’t like the voice behind Cortana. So here’s another new thing to like about it – that is if you have Cortana on your desktop or laptop running Windows 10, and you also have Cortana installed on your Android device. Apparently, you can use the assistant to send a text for you.

Reddit user “edg3d903” found out when he typed “message” on the Windows search bar and Cortana suggested if he would like to send a message. He tried it and Cortana (on his PC) sent the message through mobile as Cortana (on his smartphone). Usually, you would need third party apps like Mighty Text, Pushbullet, or Air Droid to achieve this.

If you have a Windows 10 PC and Cortana installed on your smartphone, you might want to explore this functionality. There might be other things you can have Cortana do on your smartphone from the relative confines of your laptop or desktop screen.

The Credential Manager in Windows is a relatively unknown feature, even though a lot of people are using it without being aware of its existence. Windows stores credentials in special folders that they call “vaults” to help users login to websites and other computers. The Credential Manager as such is introduced with Windows 7.

Operation

Reviewing and manually adding credentials can be done by clicking the “Credential Manager” entry on the “User Accounts and Family Safety” tab of the Control Panel.

There are a few categories. Which ones you have at your disposal depends on your Windows version, but the most common options are:

Certificate(-Based) Credentials, for SSL authentication

Domain Credentials, can be shared between applications

Windows Credentials, only used by Windows and its services

Web Credentials, used by Internet Explorer

Generic Credentials, when Credential Manager does not recognize the type as one of the above

Plaintext Password Credentials, these are very unsafe to use and should be avoided

Location

By default Windows stores the credentials in this location:

%Systemdrive%Users{Username}AppDataLocalMicrosoftCredentials

If you are having trouble finding it, you have to set “Show hidden files, folders, and drives” and uncheck “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)” under the “Folder and Search options” to find the folder and see the content.

Backup and Restore

For those of us that had no idea how this feature works, it will be a pleasant surprise to learn that you can take your credentials with you when you get a new computer or have to start from scratch with the current one. Here’s how it works:

Click the Credential Manager entry.

Click the “Back up vault” (for Windows 7) or “Back up Credentials” (for Windows 8 and Windows 10) to open the wizard that will help you with backing up or restoring of your credentials:

Click the “Back up…” button and use the “Browse” button to choose a name and location for the backup of your credentials:

Click “Next”, and then you are prompted to switch to the secure desktop by using Ctrl-Alt-Del.

Once you have done that, you can protect the backup file with a password:

Click “Next”, remove the “Removable Media” you stored the backup on and click “Finish” to close the wizard.

Restoring the credentials works pretty much the same: Start the wizard, point to the location of the .crd file, switch to secure desktop, enter your password and click “Finish”.

Note that restoring from a .crd file removes any other credentials you may have had in your vault.

Pros and Cons

The ability to store credentials on a computer is a time-saver for the owner or authorized computer users; however, the same can be said for unauthorized users. Based on the simple procedure we have outlined above, stealing your credentials is equally simple. Backing them up to a USB stick or uploading them to the cloud is a piece of cake. Once thieves get hold of the backup, it is not as difficult as you might expect to abuse the credentials. Once they have restored the credentials on another computer or Virtual Machine, they can use “vaultcmd” commands to figure out what they have gained access to.

As an example, I created this hypothetical credential for server 1.2.3.4—

—and used the command vaultcmd /listcreds:”Windows Credentials” in a command prompt. This provides an overview of all the credentials stored under “Windows Credentials” as shown below:

And if these thieves feel it is interesting enough, they can use password recovery software to get hold of the password as well, although that is not really necessary, since they will be able to login with your credentials anyway.

If you think the worst thing that could happen if you leave your computer unattended were embarrassing Facebook posts, think again. It would take a professional only seconds to steal your credentials, and after that, they have all the time to figure out what they can do with them.

Well, we know an ad when we see one, and this definitely feels like one. It feels a bit “dirtier” that OnePlus didn’t announce this together with the new update that just rolled out to the OnePlus One, so it seems like they sneaked this one in there. The update predominantly featured Cortana, another Microsoft product, but these “suggestions” were not in any way announced.

OnePlus recently rolled out update 12.1.1 for Cyanogen OS. This was the update that would bring deeper Cortana integration to the OnePlus One, if you so choose. Yes, you have a choice whether to install Cortana or not. But these suggestions appear whether OnePlus One users want them or not.

The suggestions come with the “open with” dialog – for pertinent file types, the OS now suggests to open with Microsoft OneDrive as a “suggested app” along with the other list of apps. That definitely was not there before. This is why it feels so much more like an ad than a feature – the lack of choice whether you want that suggestion or not.

OnePlus will have earned well in this deal with Microsoft, but they definitely will be on the bad side of the deal with their fans and users. To put it plainly, the suggestions happen with or without Cortana or any other Microsoft app installed – so this is embedded within the OS. Should we be expecting this kind of marketing from software manufacturers now?